Sandbox Token Faces ‘Infinite Mint’ Allegations After 500 Million SAND Minted on Base

Abnormal large-scale minting has been detected involving The Sandbox’s SAND token. Industry reports say a specific address may have gained minting authority on the Base network and issued more than 500 million additional tokens.

A large mint was detected on August 21 in the SAND smart contract on Base, according to industry participants. The initially identified amount of newly minted tokens exceeded 500 million.

SAND has a maximum supply of 3 billion tokens. If 500 million tokens were actually minted, that would equal about 16.7% of the token’s maximum supply. A so-called infinite mint attack exploits weaknesses in smart-contract permission controls or token issuance structures, allowing an attacker to create tokens at will. If those tokens enter circulation, they could dilute the value of existing holdings and trigger heavy selling pressure.

The contract identified as the site of the incident was the SAND smart contract deployed on Base, Ethereum’s Layer 2 network. The Sandbox has expanded SAND beyond Ethereum and Polygon to networks including Base and BNB Chain to lower transaction costs and broaden access.

The exact scale of the minting and the cause of the attack have not been confirmed. It also remains unclear whether the newly minted tokens were actually sold or can be moved to other networks. So far, the abnormal activity has only been reported on Base.

SAND’s price has yet to show a clear impact. On Binance’s USDT market, the token was trading around $0.051 on the day, up 13% from a day earlier. That may reflect the lack of a confirmed transfer trail for the newly minted supply and the relatively small share of Base-based liquidity in overall trading volume.